Freshly Squeezed, Vol. 60: Cam Monroe, The Night Game, Amos Lee & more

Welcome to Freshly Squeezed, a weekly new music playlist: spanning country, pop, EDM and urban, mainstream and other.

Don’t mind us. The world is on fire. The house is on fire. Our bodies are on fire. As 45 continues spouting hot, stinky garbage, we’re just going to keep trucking forward with an outreached hand of compassion and understanding. We can’t ignore the mayhem, but we can adjust our priorities and how we react to it. We can’t succumb to the hatred and let it kill us. We must link hands and soldier the oncoming storm. It’s only going to get worse, and thankfully, art can be a vehicle through which to see and hope and live and love and change.

Pop renegades The Night Game update R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and it feels far more eerie and rupturing than 30 years ago. “Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped / Look at that low plane, fine, then / Uh oh, overflow, population, common group / But it’ll do, save yourself, serve yourself,” frontman Martin Johnson sings, parsing the present as some post-apocalyptic state of decay. His performance quakes, a fearful resignation but not one which shows them giving up without some semblance of a fight. The band’s self-titled album, anchored with last week’s Caroline Polachek-featuring “Do You Think About Us,” drops Sept. 7.

Country megastar Carrie Underwood makes one of her boldest statements to-date with “Love Wins,” the second single to her forthcoming new record, Cry Pretty. Within the first stanza, she makes her intent abundantly clear. “A stray bullet and a momma cries / Her baby won’t be coming home tonight / Sirens screaming down the avenue / Just another story on the evening news, oh, whoa,” Underwood sings, her conviction soaking each word, a heaviness falling from her lungs. “Politics and prejudice / How the hell it’d ever come to this? / When everybody’s gotta pick a side / It don’t matter if you’re wrong or right, no / And so it goes, but I hold onto hope…” The big, brass anthem falls in line with much of her work, but like previous hit single “Cry Pretty,” there’s a shimmer of ’90s pop-country, ala Shania Twain and Faith Hill, hiding just beneath the surface.

But it’s relative pop newcomer Cam Monroe who kicks off her latest Freshly Squeezed iteration. “Letting Go” mingles a notable folk-lean with the soaring nature of mainstream pop. “Letting go might be what I need move,” he acknowledges, more as an urgent admission to himself than a declaration to the listener. He wraps you in a warm fleece blanket, and reminds you that moving hard can be the hardest thing to choose but one that is freeing in ways you can’t possibly imagine. And we do. We take that leap. We take that first step. We’ve never been more empowered.

The brand new playlist also includes new cuts from: Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers, Katelyn Tarver, Amos Lee, Vnce, Guthrie Brown, Eli Lev, Nina Luna, Jennifer Denali, Darren Sanchez, TeaMarr, Lauv, Nina Nesbitt, Emily Vaughn, The Struts with Kesha, The Hottman Sisters, C Z A R I N A, Broods and countless others.

In all, we’ve got 30 new songs spin and spin and spin some more.

Each playlist will be refreshed every Friday morning/afternoon. We reserve the right to update anytime during the week, so make sure you bookmark this page.

Take a spin:

https://open.spotify.com/user/bsidesbadlands/playlist/5lJi18d3QYbsbJ6ZD4CNwn?si=IMIOauB5TfarquWoWc2uMw

Photo Credit: Anna Booth

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